A few words about this exposition
“Systems Theory, Psychology, and Social Media” is an Erasmus course offered by the Department of Psychology at Panteion University, Athens, Greece. In this course, Erasmus students co-create a unique and wonderful multi-cultural mosaic, ‘the difference that makes the difference.’ In addition to lecturing, participants are engaged in intensive group work during the weekly face-to-face meetings. Between the face-to-face meetings, participants create blog reflections, narratives, and multimodal artifacts about their in-class lived experience regarding the impact social technologies and artificial intelligence have on living systems. Backed up by the technological infrastructure, a network of interconnected personal blogs, students develop a reflective group ecology of practice. The whole project is informed by complex systems’ epistemology. This virtual research exposition demonstrates the overall process in a non-linear and multimodal way. Implications for rhizomatic learning theory and education are discussed.
Traditional Articles & Research Expositions
Designed to allow for Emergence: A Learning Rhizome of Becoming is a non-linear multimodal research exposition, the equivalent to a research article in traditional academic journals. This kind of virtual exposition delivers epistemic surplus by inspiring multiple ways to explore the knowledge (re)presented here rather than imposing specific interpretations. There are multiple entry points and ways to traverse the virtual rhizome in this exposition, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987):
the rhizome connects any point to any other point... A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus … whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. (pp. 21-22)
If we consider this research exposition’s rhizome, it contains ten nodes, or plateaus in Deleuze and Guattari terminology, namely: Inception, Hub, Monday Notes, Reflective Practice, Rhizome, Intelligence, Epistemology, Discussion, References, Thank you. If all these plateaus were sections in a traditional article, there would have been only one way to traverse them. Of course, in a linear text, one can skip sections or choose own order, e.g., read first the abstract and then jump to the results, and then check the methods or read the discussion. Nevertheless, the affordances of traditional text media impose an official or default way, usually a hierarchical top-down, to access them. In a non-linear virtual exposition, this is not the case.
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25)
But what are the possible ways to traverse this exposition’s virtual rhizome? As far as there are 10 nodes/plateaus, the possible combinations are 10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2. That is 3,628,800 different ways to traverse the rhizome, with every choice made, reducing the subsequent number of available alternatives. Although we can imagine most people starting from the top-left and moving in some way toward the right-down corner, it is impossible to know the exact route a visitor would take to explore this research exposition. But each different unique pathway taken will lead to different lived experiences, different sense-making of the material exposed, and in the end, to a different recorded personal history. Therefore, it is an inherent affordance of this rhizome to create multiple performances depending on each visitors’ serendipitous choices. “Reading” this research article becomes an experimentation with singularity, a point where the available choices grow exponentially. That was exactly the aim of the “Systems Theory, Psychology, and Social Media course”. In the words of von Foerster (2003):
Tell them they should always try to act so as to increase the number of choices. (p. 295)
The practice of education as research
The current exposition attempts to build a different model of learning and teaching based on group work, experiential learning and reflective practice in order to cultivate a rhizomatic learning community. This model is put into practice in the “Systems Theory, Psychology, and Social Media” course. The teaching process during the face-to-face meetings, consists of lecturing and active learning (through group work) periods, that allow intra- and inter-communication and reflection in multiple levels. The process continues online, in the time between the physical meetings, as an ever-evolving learning experience, due to the existence of a web blogging hub that allows participants to share their personal reflections and narratives regarding the course. The present study explores the epistemology behind this course in an isomorphic way, as a virtual non-linear exposition, following the basic premise that free information flow between knowledgeable agents is the essential prerequisite for new knowledge to emerge.
The post-qualitative, performative aspect, of this exposition seems to fits best the main hypothesis of this research. Education is demonstrated here as the practice of creating learning rhizomes. Teachers should not impose rigid universal and indisputable interpretations; teachers and students should combine their best ingredients to create learning rhizomes that will be traversed by the participants in any possible way they can imagine. In the present exposition, research and education are exposed as rhizomatic practices and performative processes, the fundamental wayes to cultivate a collective inquiring mindset.
The virtual explorers of this exposition, are facilitated to create their own bridges between the plateaus, to develop their own mental representations, cognitive rhizomes, meaning networks, mind maps, conceptual graphs, personal narratives, or whatsoever you prefer to call it. This is not about a “copy and paste” procedure of an ideal original blueprint to be reproduced and further disseminated. This is rather the realization of a relational confluence, a performative dance between processes and content.
How to navigate, or co-create, a living rhizome
Dear visitor, please feel free to explore this research exposition and traverse it in any way you like. There is no right or wrong, official, or default way. Keep in mind that your way into this will probably be unique. Do not feel alone in this journey but blessed to have this opportunity to carve up your own route. Many other explorers will traverse their own unique routes, and all together, they will co-create an ever-expanding multiplicity. This is a virtual jigsaw in the becoming, where the jigsaw parts are not the virtual plateaus and their contents. The jigsaw parts are the visitors of this exposition. Me and you, and everyone else. Can you imagine the invisible rhizome we will all co-create? Do you want to be part of this confluence?
Welcome to the wonderland!
